Technology for positioning mobile radio terminals using the signals received from one or more transmitters has been widely used for many years. Such systems include terrestrial networks of transmitters (e.g. Loran) and networks of satellites (e.g. GPS and Gallileo) deployed specifically for the purpose of locating the receiver, as well as methods that use general-purpose radio networks such as cellular mobile telephone networks (e.g. WO-A-97-11384) or TV and radio transmitter networks. (e.g. EP-A-0303371).
Within a cellular mobile telephone network, for example, the position of the terminal may be based on the identity of the serving cell, augmented by information such as the time delay between the serving transmitter and terminal, the strengths of signals received from the serving and neighbouring transmitters, or angles of incidence of received signals. An improved position may be obtained using the observed time difference of arrival (OTDA) of signals received at the terminal from two or more transmission sources.
OTDA methods give good position accuracy using only the signals available within the cellular radio network. However, they require the precise transmission time offsets between transmitters to be determined in order to solve the positioning equations. This can be done using location measuring units (LMUs) having additional receivers. LMUs are placed at known locations so that their OTDA measurements can be converted directly into a network timing model (see for example WO-A-00-73813).
Alternatively a technique (see WO-A-00-73814) may be used in which measurements of signals from a number of geographically disparate transmitters at known positions made, for example, by two geographically disparate terminals at unknown positions, may be used to compute both the positions of the terminals and all the timing offsets between the measured transmitters, without the need for LMUs.
Satellite positioning systems, such as GPS, provide an accurate solution provided that the receiver can receive sufficient satellite signals. The satellite signals are related to a common time-base of a globally defined standard time, e.g. GPS Time or Universal Coordinated Time, UTC. For example, within GPS, each satellite in the constellation has a stable atomic clock whose time is continuously measured and compared with a single reference clock located on the ground. The time of each satellite clock is steered towards alignment with the reference clock and a three-parameter model derived which describes the difference in time between the two clocks. The three parameters are up-loaded to the satellite and broadcast by the satellite as the clock correction parameters. This has the effect, after making corrections based on the parameters, of aligning the satellite clock closely with the ground-based reference clock. Satellite positioning systems work well in situations where the receiver's antenna has clear sight of the sky, but they work poorly, or not at all, inside buildings or when the view of the sky is obscured. Another problem is that they take a long time to achieve a “first fix” from a cold start and they therefore work best when they are tracking the satellite signals continuously.